Now, one of our members has helpfully suggested that it's crazy to count keystrokes or complain about the time spent waiting for some function or other to execute, or compose macros to perform tedious input. But all that time Bill causes you to waste sitting back watching the monitor update or retyping a sentence because you had accidentally hits the Caps Lock (cleverly situated just above the Shift), can really mount up

In this connection, without my permission, Bill or one of his cohorts has gratuitously added to one of my taskbars a button called "This is Spam." Pushing it causes a selected item from your inbox to be transferred to the Norton Antispam Folder, which you can empty later any time with a single keystroke. Wonderful, I thought, until I discovered that unlike the instantaneous delete button, it takes up to five seconds for the new button to perform the transfer

Well you ask, what's five seconds. Well, I reply, some folks of my acquaintance receive hundreds of spam every day, each one requiring one keystroke to transfer, entailing over a period of only ten years, easily one million keystrokes occupying five million seconds of your valuable screen-sucking time

The interested reader may wish to calculate that in minutes, hours, or days spent repeatedly hitting the button and then sitting back waiting for action

If the "This is spam" button saves you from seeing more spam of the same type, how much of your time is it worth to have it do its thing. I submit that the routine that you initiate by tagging a given email as spam is analyzing it and uses the results of that analysis to filter out more spam so you don't ever have to look at it.

and as a point of history, the standard qwerty keyboard lay out dated back to the beginning of the last century, when keys layout was intentional scrabbled, to slow typist down.

Bill Gates wasn't even a gleam in his father's eye when the shift key and cap lock keys were first put into there current positions on the keyboard.

(keyboard then were less flat, and perhaps it was harder to mistake a shift key for a caplocks, key, but flatter keyboards started appearing with the first electric (not electronic) keyboards, (i remember them from the late 1950's, but they could be earlier than that)

typewriters at first came in countless designs, (before 1 or 2 styles began to dominate.)

at first, (like computer operating systems) you needed to find a typist (and actualy at first, 'typewriter' was the operater, not the machine) who was proficient on the style of machine you owned (but some typist would provide their own machines!) (just as in the beginning of computers there were Lainer Os, Wang Os, DOS, and (senior moment--the 3 letter one used on main frames and adapted for PC's?) and eventually things settled down (thought there are still more OS's than most users think, (linux, Mac, MSDos, (and its spawn))

Still, (getting back to typewriters) all of these mechanical devices , with springs and levers and tie rods, would jam if you typed too fast.

so manufacturers made them harder to use (to slow typist down) and provided free training on how to use them.

and over time the qwerty (named for top row of left hand keys) became the standard lay out (since electronic devices, and computer have been around, there are more logical layout available, but since most of use know how to type with a querty board, it remains dominant. (you can readily find other layouts if you want--they often are premiumly prices, and require you to relearn how to type.)

the qwerty board, has the the vowels intentionally hard to to type. it has the vowels under awkward fingers. (a under left pinky, e is worked with left middle finger, i and o under middle and ring finger of right hand, but these require movemtent to reach.. U (the least used vowel) is the easiest to type, (a movement to reach it, but it is typed with right index finger )

i am sure wiki or other sites (perhaps IBM) have info on the history of the typewriters and keyboard lay outs.

some other lay outs are available as software download, (and you just learn to ignore the letters printed on the keys!)

Fal: '"This is spam" button saves you from seeing more spam of the same type,...'

***Forgive if I wasn't clear. I don't think it's even feasible to write an algorithm that can reliably distinguish spam, as compared with the human mind which can do so within a second. It is the subsequent five seconds of his life that are wasted

Helen: ‘...the standard lay out (since electronic devices, and computer have been around,...’

***Owing I must assume to digital constraints several key locations have in fact been shifted around since I used the typewriter (eg, some punctuation and symbols, with margin release replaced by one corner of Enter, while “1” must now occupy a separate key). But Bill's crew just haven't seemed to realize how many trillions of keystrokes and days if not years of humanity's time have been wasted thanks to the proximity of the Shift and Caps Lock

***...though I readily conceded that the better typists probably don't experience this problem as frequently as do the lazy (me)

***At first I too thought Helen was joking, but she seems to know her stuff. I had read that its inventors started with the keys in alphabetical order then somewhat clumsily scrambled them in an effort to assign the most-used keys to the most easily-accessed positions. This latter part of the account could be apocryphal but could account for the most used, etaionshrdlu, being situated mainly toward the top with Q, W, Z, X and P assigned to the most awkward positions

***Though another theory, according to Wiki, asserts they’re arranged ‘...so that successive keystrokes would alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams'

***Meantime as Helen points out, faster keyboards have been devised but too late

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